Hidden Treasure Trove.

An old Santa Monica telephone building is a 'lending library' for Eli Broad's art foundation, which boasts one of the world's top collections of contemporary works

FOR about a dozen years, a nondescript former telephone switching station a block from the sand in Santa Monica has stood squarely but quietly at the center of the contemporary art world.

Unknown to most -- including many of its neighbors -- billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad purchased and renovated the one-time GTE operations center in 1988 to serve as a unique "lending library" for the Broad Art Foundation, which he established four years earlier.

While the mission of the foundation is to make the best of contemporary art available to the public, don't expect to walk in off the street and check out the works by such contemporary artists as Keith Haring, Charles Ray, Cindy Sherman and John Baldessari with your library card.

The building itself is closed to the public. Its extensive exhibition space is reserved for art scholars, curators, museum groups and writers, and the space serves as a conduit for works on their way to museums and galleries around the world.

From the basement to the roof, about 80 to 100 of the foundation's nearly 700 works are on display at any given time. The building also houses an extensive library and archive collection. Broad, 67, who stepped down last year as CEO of SunAmerica Corp., had his eye on the building for some time before GTE agreed to sell.

"I knew the president (at GTE) and I told him, 'If you're ever not using it, I want to but it,"' Broad said. "One day I finally got that call, and we bought it."

Having evolved into a museum unto itself, the Santa Monica building is at the cutting edge of Broad's far-reaching efforts to enrich Los Angeles' cultural landscape. Unlike his famed private collection, which is heavy in pop art and covers much of the 20th century, the foundation focuses on artists and works that have emerged in the past 25 years.

"Eli saw an opportunity to create a unique art space and a way of supporting the (artwork) loan program," said Joanne Heyler, foundation curator. "There's no substitute for being able to showcase the collection to our audience, which is art museums."

Borrowers range from the Tate Gallery in London and the Smithsonian Institution to the Boise Art Museum. The foundation's high lending rate -- about 25 to 35 percent of the collection is loaned each year -- is due in large part to the ability of the borrowers to view the pieces as the artists intended them to be seen.

"It's very impressive; it's a real resource for students and the community," said Ruth Weisberg, dean of the USC School of Fine Arts. "For serious and ambitious art students, it's a place where they can go to see work they wouldn't see at the (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) or even at MOCA."

Personal vision

Outside the foundation, a plain white buzzer on a plain white box gains a visitor entry through a plain metal door. Once inside, however, nothing is usual about the space at all.

From Charles Ray's "Fall," an enormously tall and imposing female figure dressed in a red business suit, to Kara Walker's mural-sized "Danse de la Nubienne Nouveaux," many of the works are done in an exaggerated scale and most are intentionally provocative.

After he bought the building, Broad hired noted architect Frederick Fisher to redesign the space. Fisher eliminated columns to create the wide open rooms necessary for exhibiting large works, took out numerous small windows and installed a few large ones to take their place.

Part of the second floor houses a suite of offices and the foundation's library, while the rest of the building is reserved for art.

With input from Heyler and others, the art, which is rotated every 12 to 18 months, largely reflects Broad's personal preferences.

"It's a challenging collection that reflects a personal vision. Most of the art doesn't wear its theory on its sleeve," Heyler said. "We follow artists as they evolve. We try to follow the arch of their careers."

The Broad collection also includes numerous works from such noted contemporary artists as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, Robert Therrien, Roy Lichtenstein and Frank Stella.

Broad said that when he started the foundation in the 1980s -- in part, because he had run out of room at home -- museums were struggling and much of the best of contemporary art was not available to the public.

"We wanted to help museums, which at the time didn't have any money," he said. "I saw a lot of contemporary art going into hiding, so to speak. Many of the people who were buying it were not putting it into public institutions."

Venture philanthropy

Broad was founding director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown, helped rescue the then-foundering Walt Disney Concert Hall project a few years ago, and last year, with his wife, Edythe, donated $20 million for a new art center at UCLA. In short, Broad has built a reputation as one of the nation's foremost art patrons while pursuing a personal mission to raise the cultural profile of Los Angeles.

This fall, the first national show featuring works solely from the Broad collections will open at LACMA.

After catching the bug for Modern Art a quarter century ago, Broad has invested countless hours studying art and cultivating relationships with artists while spending untold millions to build not one but two world-class collections.

"Collecting is not just acquiring objects, it's a learning and educational process," said Broad, who has referred to his collecting as "venture philanthropy." "If you're going to be an intelligent collector, you don't get there by listening to other people's advice. You have to invest the time."

For Broad -- who estimates that the foundation, including endowment and collection, is worth about $100 million -- it's also not about trophy buying. Despite Broad's considerable wealth, the foundation shies away from spending millions on a single piece. Instead, it carefully selects its pieces based on quality and value.

Still, when Broad wants something, he usually gets it, Heyler said.

"The collection was built with a speed and agility that's only possible in a private collection," Heyler said. "Eli, who is not one to do anything in moderation, got involved in the art world very quickly. His orientation is, 'How can we make this happen, how can we move this forward?"'

The foundation itself is clearly moving forward. Though the 20th century has passed, Broad said the foundation will continue adding to what is already perhaps the world's preeminent collection of Western art over the past 25 years.

"I'm very proud that millions of people a year see our work," Broad said. "Not on our walls; we're not in the exhibition business, and it's not our role to compete with museums. But because of our foundation, the art is seen all over the world."